In this panel discussion from QCon San Francisco, several influential leaders of the software development community discussed and debated the future of the Java language and APIs based upon the lessons we have learned from the past. Topics included static versus dynamic languages, removing code from Java, forking the JVM, and the next big programming language.

In: InfoQ

DNS root servers finally support IPv6.

Paul Twomey, president of Icann, said: “There’s pressure for people to make the conversion to IPv6. We’re pushing this as a major issue.”

The reason for the urgency, he said, was because the unallocated addresses from the total of 4,294,967,296 possible with IPv4 was rapidly running out.

“We’re down to 14% of the unallocated addresses out of the whole pool for version 4,” he said.

Some people say that is too late. The net’s current addressing scheme is expected to exhaust the pool of unallocated addresses by 2011.

In: BBC.co.uk

I’m not a GUI developer guy and I only used to think about it when I had some kind of trouble. However, after reading a lot about it, I start to give them the value they deserve.

Brent Simmons, NetNewsWire developer, wrote a great article about a “simple” two steps wizard.

Presentation by Joshua Bloch here.

Swing is the worst design and API in Java (unanimity) but no one can denied that we have other problem.

“Joda-Time provides a quality replacement for the Java date and time classes…”

Why should we keep fighting with XML?

Raven is a build tool for Java programs based on Rake and Ruby Gems. Homepage here and ONJava article here.

Colin Barker, of ZDNet, wrote an interesting article about the biggest IT disasters. Probably, the most interesting thing to notice is the number of software bugs at the top!

1. Functional bug;
2. Functional bug (overflow);
3. Switch bug (network congestion);
4. Outdated software;
5. Functional bug (different metrics used);
6. Functional bug (wrong math);
7. Functional - potential - bug (y2k)
8. Hardware problem;
9. Bad planning;
10. Network adapter bug (network congestion);

In: ZDNet

Click here to check some simple improvements to Java.

We will have String Switches, Chained Invocations and Improved Catch Clauses!

Your security teacher wasn’t insane! Today, someone remembered us that we have in our browser the biggest MD5 dictionary of the world!

“A security researcher at Cambridge was trying to figure out the password used by somebody who had hacked his Web site. He tried running a dictionary through the encryption hash function; no dice. Then he pasted the hacker’s encrypted password into Google, and voila — there was his answer. Conclusion? Use no password that any other human being has ever used, or is ever likely to use, for any purpose. I think.”

In: Slashdot

Why write the same code again?

Google Code Search is the answer to your prayers. With a simple query “lang:c fibonacci“, we find thousands of solutions written in C to the Fibonacci problem.